'Faerie Folk' Strike Back With Fritters

By KIM SEVERSON

Published: December 6, 2006

PEOPLE here despise FEMA, insurance companies and anyone who has anything to do with levees.

But in a city with postal service so spotty that delivery of a magazine is cause for a party, a magazine writer from New York has moved to the top of the New Orleans hate list.

For eight pages in the November issue of GQ, Alan Richman, a veteran food writer, talked trash about New Orleans and its food. He did not just take a few jabs at some subpar gumbo. The man essentially called New Orleanians fat, lazy and too hung over to recognize good food. Mr. Richman suggested that before Hurricane Katrina, many of the big-name Creole restaurants -- and here he may have a point -- had the stodgy stink of 1950s French hotel food and might not be worth saving.

But what provoked the most vitriol was his assertion that there is no such thing as a Creole.

''I have never met one and suspect they are a faerie folk, like leprechauns, rather than an indigenous race,'' he wrote. He added that ''the idea that you might today eat an authentic Creole dish is a fantasy.''

That claim had the unifying force of an invitation to a seafood boil. An agitated city attacked.

''I'd like to throw him in the back room at Tipitina's with all the Neville brothers and see if he still thinks Creoles don't exist,'' said Poppy Tooker, a cooking teacher who was raised in New Orleans.

Like some others involved with New Orleans food, she offers a vulgar gesture when Mr. Richman is mentioned. That's because to say Creoles don't exist is to deny the very culture that makes New Orleans different from every other city in the United States.

''You cannot live in New Orleans and not know what it means to be Creole,'' said Greg Osborn, a New Orleans Public Library archivist and historian who is Creole. ''There's a connection among all Creoles that goes beyond the color of your skin.''

But when you try to get people to agree on just what a Creole is, you start to think Mr. Richman might be right. Ask six Louisianans to define it and you'll get 12 answers.

''It's the name everyone wants to be called but no one can tell you what it is,'' said Dickie Breaux, owner of the Caf?es Amis in Breaux Bridge, a Cajun restaurant and music spot a couple hours' drive west of New Orleans.

Louisiana Creole scholars use a textbook definition that transcends race and ethnicity. They say anyone whose ancestors were born in Louisiana during colonial times is a Creole. But Creole also means a genetic mix of colonial settlers, indigenous people and slaves, so it has a racial connotation. In Acadiana, the Cajun homeland in southwest Louisiana, Creole can be code for anyone who is not white. In New Orleans, some use the word to denote people of color with some white ancestry, but it is also claimed by white descendants of the French settlers.

The word has a larger meaning to people who live here. It takes in everything they are most proud of. It encompasses architecture, in the form of Creole cottages, and music, both zydeco and early jazz. And, of course, there is Creole food.

Not that any of that mattered much to Mr. Richman, who never liked New Orleans, although he came here on his honeymoon several years ago. (He is recently divorced, but insists he doesn't blame the city.)

He says he was simply trying to write the first unsentimental piece about New Orleans food in a world in which having a contrarian opinion is no longer valued. ''You have to be behind everything these days,'' he said. ''You have to be behind the president, you have to be behind New Orleans.''

After his article appeared, Mr. Richman was pilloried by bloggers. An e-mail petition called for his firing, based on ''racist invective.'' A spitting mad Brett Anderson, the food writer for The Times-Picayune, took him on in print, writing that ''Richman's story is a weakling's idea of what it means to be tough.''

Despite the public pummeling, Mr. Richman is unrepentant.

''If people want to call themselves Creoles, fine,'' he said. ''I am now calling myself a tight end for the New York Giants.''

Leah Chase, 83, the city's most revered Creole cook, hadn't read the magazine. She is preoccupied with trying to reopen Dooky Chase's, her restaurant, which was soaked in five feet of water. But she had heard plenty about it.

Last week, standing in front of her Federal Emergency Management Agency trailer, across from her restaurant in the Trem?eighborhood, she pointed out that she happened to be a real live Creole and that she cooked like one, too. But she was too polite to criticize Mr. Richman outright.

''You can never understand what is in a man's heart,'' she said.

One way to understand Creole food is to compare it with Cajun food. Creole is fancy and urban; Cajun is simple and country. Creole gumbo has tomatoes; Cajun does not. Creole dishes rely on butter; Cajun on pork fat.

The most important measure, though, is to remember that what ends up on the Creole plate is determined by who one's grandmother was. The Creole kitchen has been touched by countries including Senegal, Gambia, Cameroon, Haiti, Spain, Cuba, Germany and Italy. The common denominators are the raw ingredients that grow in southern Louisiana and a cultural dip in French haute cuisine.

''It's a better cuisine than any of them individually,'' said Marcelle Bienvenu, one of Louisiana's longtime culinary authorities.

Of course, like any culture's menu, Creole cooking has expanded and contracted with every change that has rolled through town. Sometimes it has been for the better, as when the Italians brought artichokes and red gravy or when Cajun and Creole food met in Paul Prudhomme's kitchen. Sometimes it has been for the worse, as when the lure of the tourist dollar turned some classic restaurants into Creole Disney.

After Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in late summer and early fall of 2005, home cooks and progressive restaurant chefs found that classic flavors like shrimp r?ulade and Creole cream cheese were as important to the city's recovery as a good contractor, and easier to find. That added extra sting to Mr. Richman's article. He attacked Creole culture exactly when people in New Orleans had become serious about preserving it.

One positive post-storm development has been the revival of old recipes. This year Ms. Bienvenu reissued her Cajun/Creole book, ''Who's Your Mama, Are You Catholic, and Can You Make a Roux?'' (Acadian House Publishing). It has helped rebuild many cookbook libraries lost to the hurricanes.

She is also helping The Times-Picayune pull together a new cookbook. Less than two months after Katrina hit the city, the newspaper's food editor, Judy Walker, began asking readers which recipes they had lost, and engaged more fortunate readers to fill the requests. She prints them in a reoccurring column, rebuilding the recipe files of the flood victims and turning young generations of cooks on to dishes they hadn't heard of.

One dish that will be in the book is beef daube glace, which speaks to the fancier aspirations of Creole food. A proper Creole table in the 18th and 19th centuries was often set with slices of the daube, which traditionally requires a daunting day's work boiling calves' or pigs' feet to make the gelatin that binds a mixture of boiled beef and chopped vegetables.

It appeared regularly at the r?illon, the meal served after midnight Mass on Christmas Eve and on New Year's Eve. In the 1980s several restaurants tried to reignite the tradition by offering r?illon menus in December.

A more modern version of beef daube glace was developed in the early 1990s in the kitchen of Mr. B's Bistro, a French Quarter restaurant that is still being renovated post-Katrina.

Gerard Maras, then the executive chef, dug through old cookbooks and talked to people who had eaten it for years before developing a dish that had the same flavor and texture but a more modern approach. Ms. Bienvenu will include it in the new book.

Barbara Trevigne doesn't know much about beef daube glace, but she does know about the Creole link sausage called chaurice. A social worker, preservationist and performing artist, Ms. Trevigne calls herself a displaced Creole of color. She is living in a FEMA trailer while her soaked home is being rebuilt in the Seventh Ward, which is considered the most Creole of the city's neighborhoods and which took on several feet of water.

She is waiting for a chance to fry some local chaurice, which takes its name from the Spanish chorizo and the French saucission. Ms. Trevigne used to buy hers from a local sausagemaker who lost his business to the flood.

''I miss all the food in the Seventh Ward, but I really miss that sausage,'' she said.

Chaurice is highly seasoned with a slightly loose texture. Traditionally made with a mix of beef and pork, all-beef or all-pork versions are more common now. Its bite comes from black and red pepper, its depth from garlic and green onion tops, and its color from a handful of paprika.

Vance Vaucresson is from a Creole family that has been making chaurice for more than 100 years. Katrina took out the family sausage operation on St. Bernard Avenue, but a competitor from a nearby suburb of Metairie has allowed Mr. Vaucresson to make chaurice there while he rebuilds.

Mr. Vaucresson can talk about Creoles and sausage for days, but he was more excited last week when he watched rice fritters called calas boil in a pan of hot oil.

The cala (pronounced cah-LAH) has roots in Ghana. In 18th century New Orleans, Creole women of color who had the day off from their domestic jobs sold them out of baskets, shouting, ''Calas, belles, calas tout chauds!'' (Beautiful calas, very hot!)

Save for a few Creole grandmothers, who made them for special events like First Communion and Mardi Gras, calas had almost faded away.

Since Katrina, they have reappeared in some restaurants, as a dessert or in the form of savory fritters made with wild rice and smoked catfish or with duck confit.

Ms. Tooker, who is not a Creole, became an unlikely savior of the cala. She has been making it for years at festivals and in cooking classes, and has used her position in the national Slow Food organization to raise the fritter's profile. She makes the batter with baking powder, which traditionalists argue is all wrong. Some people think yeast gives the modern cala the flavor they remember from childhood. Other purists suggest no leavening at all, with a batch simply mixed the night before and allowed to gather natural bacteria and ferment in a warm place overnight.

For modern-day Creoles like Mr. Vaucresson, the leavening doesn't matter a bit. What's important is that one more piece of Creole history is being pulled back from the edge of extinction.

He stood in Ms. Tooker's kitchen last week, eating calas as fast as she could pull them out of the hot oil.

''Whether it's a good cala or bad cala doesn't matter,'' he said. ''Any cala is a good cala because someone is still cooking them.''

1. In a fryer or a deep pot, add oil to a depth of at least three inches, and bring to 360 degrees. In a large bowl, combine rice, flour, sugar, baking powder, salt and nutmeg.
2. In a small bowl, mix together eggs and vanilla. Add to rice mixture and stir with a fork until well blended. Keep mixture cool (below 70 degrees) so that it will not separate when dropped into hot oil.
3. When oil is correct temperature, drop in heaping tablespoons of batter. Calas will brown on one side and turn themselves over. When browned on both sides, after about 5 minutes, remove them with a wire skimmer and drain on paper towels. Sprinkle with confectioners' sugar, and serve hot.

1. Fill a large pot with lightly salted water and add lemon juice. Bring to a boil, add artichokes and cook until artichokes are tender when pierced with a knife through the bottom, 30 to 40 minutes. Drain and allow to cool. Scrape fleshy part of each leaf into a bowl, discarding leaves. Using a small spoon or knife, remove prickly choke at center of base, then cut base into large chunks, adding it to bowl.
2. In a large skillet over medium-low heat, melt 4 tablespoons butter. Add mushrooms and saut?ust until mushrooms are tender and have released their liquid; do not allow pan to dry. Immediately transfer mushrooms and any liquid to a small bowl.
3. Place a large skillet over medium-low heat and add 8 tablespoons butter. When butter has melted, add flour and stir until mixture is lightly browned. Add scallions, oysters and their liquor, and salt and pepper to taste. Simmer until oysters are firm, about 10 minutes.
4. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. In a 9- to 10-inch round shallow baking pan or pie plate, spread artichoke pieces. Top with oyster mixture and mushrooms. Spread with an even layer of bread crumbs. Dot with small pieces of remaining 1 tablespoon butter. Bake until golden brown, 15 to 20 minutes. Serve hot on small plates.

1. Rub beef all over with Creole seasoning. Place a heavy braising pan or wide casserole over medium heat and melt butter. Add beef and brown well on all sides. Add onions, carrots, garlic, bay leaves and pepper flakes. Saut?ntil vegetables are slightly softened, about 5 minutes.
2. Add hot sauce, Worcestershire sauce, stock and tomatoes with their juices. Cover and cook, turning occasionally, until beef is very tender and almost falling apart, about 3 hours.
3. Remove meat from pan and cut across grain into slices about 1/2-inch wide. Break into small pieces, shredding and crumbling meat slightly. Set aside in a large bowl. Remove bay leaves from pan and discard. Add about 1/2 cup vegetables to bowl of meat. Strain remaining broth into a clean saucepan, and boil until reduced to 3 cups. Adjust salt to taste, add gelatin mixture, and pour into bowl of meat.
4. Pour meat mixture into one 10-cup terrine, p? pan or loaf pan, or 2 or 3 smaller pans. Cover and refrigerate until well chilled and firm, at least 12 hours. Serve as an appetizer with a sliced baguette, or sprinkle with vinegar and eat like a p? with cornichons, or season with salt and pepper and use as a sandwich filling.

Yield: 20 to 30 appetizer servings.

Photos: OUT OF AFRICA -- After they are deep-fried in hot oil, Creole rice fritters called calas are dusted with sugar. (Photo by Cheryl Gerber for The New York Times)(pg. F1); STORIES WORTH TELLING, A DISH WORTH EATING -- A recent gathering in New Orleans included plates of gumbo and tales of Creole heritage.; STIRRING GUMBO -- Barbara Trevigne calls herself a Creole of color, while her cousin Peter Patout calls himself a white Creole.; SAVED BY A HURRICANE -- Interest in making food like calas was revived after Katrina. (Photographs by Cheryl Gerber for The New York Times)(pg. F16)